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By Root 644 0

universities is ablaze with anti-Semitism, the segment suggested, though the crowds at Muhammad’s speeches at Howard reportedly consisted largely of people with no affiliation with the campus. As Otesa Middleton and Larry Brown, editors of the student newspaper, subsequently pointed out in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, the producers of the CBS segment included comments from only two Howard students but made it appear that the two represented the views of everyone at Howard. Not only was the impression false, the student editors argued, planting it was journalistically irresponsible. “The media would do better to devote its resources to exposing the real causes of racial and social injustice,” they wrote.21

But the infatuation with Muhammad continued. He garnered major attention for a speech in 1997 at San Francisco State University in which he denied that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and spoke of Zionists with “hairy hands” whom he said were “pimping the world.” When he announced that he would lead a youth march in Harlem in 1998, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani provided reporters with anti-Semitic statements Muhammad had made over the years and urged them to reprint the slurs. Bob Herbert of the New York Times was among those who took the bait. In one of his columns, Herbert made it sound as if Jews had great cause for worry about Muhammad, and about black anti-Semitism more generally. Quoting several of Muhammad’s most loathsome anti-Jewish slurs from the past few years, Herbert issued a challenge to black leaders: “It would be helpful if some prominent African-American leaders, faced with the grotesque reality of a virulent anti-Semite playing Pied Pier to the nation’s black children, would stand up and say enough is enough.”22

Various black leaders, having been chastised several years earlier, had already done so, but others shared the view of Representative Don Edwards, who observed that “this scoundrel would become a national and international hero” by being stigmatized. Indeed, the main beneficiaries of the lavish attention directed at demagogues like Khalid Muhammad are the demagogues themselves. Nation of Islam leaders use Jew-bashing to attract the media and pull crowds. Even Louis Farrakhan has been a fixture in the press largely on account of his anti-Semitic remarks, which distinguish him from other, more mainstream black leaders. Jonathan Kaufman, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, goes so far as to suggest that Farrakhan’s black political rivals are his true targets when he speaks of Jews as “bloodsuckers” or slave traders. In making such statements he establishes himself, notes Kaufman, as the lone black man who will stand up to whites and openly condemn a powerful group of them. In Kaufman’s view, when Farrakhan slanders Jews what he’s really saying is, “All those other black leaders are too timid to speak out and tell the truth.”23

Farrakhan says much the same about African-American journalists. “A scared-to-death Negro is a slave, you slave writers, slave media people,” he bellowed in a speech in 1996 to a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. Perhaps what angered Farrakhan about black journalists in the mainstream media is their neglect of him. It has been a group of white columnists, after all, who have built Farrakhan up as more momentous than he is. In addition to Rosenthal, Cohen, and Herbert, there’s the Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, who has written about him and Muhammad in at least a dozen pieces, and Fred Barnes, the magazine editor and former White House correspondent, who on a network TV talk show dubbed Farrakhan the “leading anti-Semite and separatist in this country,” thereby ignoring thousands of skinheads, klansmen, neo-Nazis and militiamen, and several well-known leaders of the Christian right, all of whom have equal claim to that title. Randall Terry of Operation Rescue, for instance, holds “Jewish doctors” responsible for one-quarter of the nation’s “baby killings,” and Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association sees Jewish